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Desktop Cold Fusion Reconsidered
Armchair Anarchist writes "Nature.com reports on Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is once again claiming to have achieved ultrasound-induced fusion in deuterium-enriched acetone. Other experts are sceptical, but Taleyarkhan is keen to have other scientists check his results."
From the article:
The idea is simple enough. Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000 C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart.
This isn't cold fusion, it's just a sneaky way of achieving hot fusion without huge x-ray lasers and giant magnets and such.
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"Although the neutron count doubles at some points in the experiments, Putterman says that neutrons produced in random showers of cosmic rays, rather than fusion events, could be responsible. But Taleyarkhan points out that the neutron count was smaller in detectors further from the reaction chamber.
To prove that the neutrons are coming from fusion as bubbles burst, Putterman and Suslick suggest that the team closely monitor exactly when the neutrons appear. The current experiment simply counts up the number of neutrons detected over minutes, so correlations with bubble bursts cannot be seen."
They are NOT yet sure whether the neutrons come from bubbles or from cosmic rays.
So let's not start the usual jokes about using car stereos to power cars, sound waves harming swan ears, etc.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
A byproduct of this research has led him to create the variable velocity bullet. You can read more here: http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventors/a/ve locity_bullet.htm
http://religiousfreaks.com/Cold Fusion should focus on the server where it belongs. The desktop is just a pipe dream.
Unjustly dismissive. First off, even initially, Taleyarkhan rallied about as much support as he did opposition. Now, even much of his initial opposition considers his work valid. Sonofusion seems to be quite a real phenominon (albeit, currently six orders of magnitude from breakeven).
Here's a very interesting paper by him in Oct. 2005, in which they discuss many of the recent developments, including the potential for nonlinear scaling of efficiency and even the possibility of criticality. It's a very interesting read.
The *special* hell.
The reason their experiment only works "sometimes", is because the US Military Industrial Complex is in cahoots with Big Oil and is using alien technology from the Rosswell crash to constantly alter the laws of physics in close proximity to any attempted Cold Fusion reactions.
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Don't believe the hype; Tinfoil hats work.
"Sceptical" is the British spelling, you wancre.
Even before getting to any goal of practical power generation, the most important thing in a scientific investigation is to structure it to avoid doubts -- meaning either proving or disproving it completely. There's no dishonour in disproving it, if it helps to clarify what the remaining fusion possibilities are. Dr Taleyarkhan should have specifically monitored the neutron outputs to see if they had any cyclicality that coincided with the bubble oscillation cycle. If you get neutron spikes when the bubbles implode, then that's a very helpful sign consistent with acoustic fusion occurring. Why a big scientist like him didn't do such an obvious thing worries me. But the article says that Putterman et all will be working to duplicate his experiments. Duplication is really the essential thing for proving something. After all, if it only works when Taleyarkhan does it, but not for anybody else, then you know something's wrong.
... and he's a freakin' genius. He taught us very briefly about his work, but was hesitant when I took the class to go into a lot of details because of the pre-publication nature of the work. The TA for the class, Adam Butt, is also a very quick guy. Although I recognize the possibility of fabrication, all the people I know around the project were hesitant to make claims until they had better proof. They are still hesitant to proclaim victory. All things considered, I think this is the most promising energy work since the Manhattan project.